In recent times, the demands from users and the requirements from the Internet have changed dramatically. Today, huge amount of data is generated and shared among the users on Internet in a variety of forms such as online streaming, live TV/videos, online gaming, etc. Currently, the Internet is primarily a point-to-point or host-to-host network where information is identified by its location on the network, while on the other hand the users are more concerned about the content rather than the location from where the content is being accessed. Moreover, huge amount of bandwidth is being wasted due to the content encapsulation or host based nature of the Internet. The increasing demand for scalable and efficient distribution of content has led to the development of future Internet architectures, such as Information Centric Networks (ICNs) and Software Defined Networks (SDNs). The Information Centric Networks (ICN) has been proposed as an alternative design for the Internet with a specific focus on content centric communication rather than host-to-host communication such as web browsing, telnet or ftp. This requires the content or ICN chunk, generally referred to as ICN level packet, to be cashed or stored at intermediate routers and/or switches en-route to the original server to satisfy the future demands for the same ICN chunks locally.
Prior art solutions provides various caching policies for example but not limited to Least Recently Used (LRU), First In First Out (FIFO), Random etc. A majority of existing solutions describing caching policies are not best suited for ICN networks as they are mostly inherited from the operating system paging policies. The policies described in prior art are also not optimal, such as they do not adjust themselves according to the traffic, location of the content, location of the user and the source, etc. In addition, prior art literature has never account for the underlying network characteristics, thereby various network parameters including distance from the content source, frequency of accessing content, number of outgoing links at the intermediate network devices including routers, cache size, accessibility of one or more of network devices, priority of the content provided by one or more of user, application and service provider were never given due consideration. Thereby most of the prior art caching policies are either sub-optimal or not suitable for ICN networks. Thus there is need for an optimal caching method and system for caching in ICN networks, which is generalized in nature, highly adaptable thus can be applied universally to various network and usage scenarios. There is also a need for a system where a content-metric may be used as a function of various network parameters, and further enables users to include additional network parameters if required for metric calculations.
Prior art literature have illustrated various caching policies, however, a method and system for optimal caching of content in an Information Centric Networks (ICN) and a cache replacement based on content metric value that can adapt to the underlying network scenarios more suitable for the Information Centric Networks (ICN) is still considered as one of the biggest challenges of the technical domain.